HP-UX 11i SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
Can Solaris and AIX5L support large data sets and provide linear scalability?
Answer: NO.
IT managers are mainly concerned about the performance and scalability of the
commercial applications that are mission critical to their business. Lack of performance
and linear scalability can cause slow downs that cause millions of dollars of loss of
productivity.
HP-UX 11i’s support for large data sets enables impressive application performance.
The ability of the operating system to support large data sets is very critical to
commercial application performance such as SAP and Oracle databases.
Supporting large data sets is a function of:
 CPU scalability and I/O bandwidth management
 Memory Scalability and SMP support
 File System support with Journal File System availability
CPU Scalability:
 HP-UX 11i supports 64 cpus and up to 128 node clustering (16 node high
availability clustering). AIX 4.3.3 and AIX 5L can support only 32 cpus (on 16
chips).
 I/O bandwidth directly impacts performance specially when thousands of
customers, partners and employees are accessing the same application and
database. Process Resource Manager (PRM) is a resource management tool
provided by hp that is used to control the amount of resources that processes use
during peak system load (at 100% CPU, 100% memory, or 100% disk bandwidth
utilization). This enables the IT manager to control the way different applications
access system resources based on need and optimizes their performance. PRM
can guarantee a minimum entitlement of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth
resources available to a group of processes. PRM can also enforce a maximum
cap of CPU and memory resources. HP PRM provides a disk I/O bandwidth
control feature that allows an administrator to define the priorities of disk’s read
and write operations for different PRM groups, positively impacting the
application performance.
Memory scalability and SMP support:
 HP-UX 11i supports 256 GB of memory while Sun Solaris can support only up to
192 GB.
 HP-UX supports variable sized virtual memory pages and dynamically adjusts the
page sizes used for applications to optimize performance. No administrator
intervention is required. HP PRM works with memory manager to specify
memory entitlements.
 HP-UX supports enhanced database performance with 64 bit addressing for PARISC and Itanium systems, and this enables systems to access very large physical
and virtual memory.

Shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) boosts system performance by harnessing
multiple processors within a single server that all share the same memory and I/O
resources. Because SMP incurs fewer penalties related to management and
processing overhead than other multiprocessing techniques, and is also relatively
easy for application developers to exploit in their code, it remains one of the most
effective ways to increase system performance for many key business
applications, including database servers and Online Transaction Processing
(OLTP) functions. Since all processors in an SMP server must be able to access
all system resources simultaneously, operating systems are deeply involved in the
quality of an SMP implementation. Indeed, enabling a kernel to effectively
manage large numbers of processors has traditionally presented an extraordinary
and tedious challenge for operating-system developers. HP-UX had a tpmC
number of 200 with 48 processors as apposed to Sun with a 150 tpmC number
with 64 processors due in part to the lagging performance of Sun’s UltraSPARC
II processor.
File System scalability with Journal File System availability:
 HP-UX 11i supports 2TB of file system sizes. Sun Solaris can support only 1 TB.
File system scalability is a function of its resiliency that is assured by hp-ux’s
superior Journal File System.
 JFS (Journal File System) is a high-integrity, highly available file system
supported in the HP-UX operating system. JFS uses data base techniques of
logging and log reply to improve file system resiliency. This technique allows the
file system to keep its consistency by only scanning the log, and completing
unfinished transactions if necessary, instead of having to scan the entire file
system. Thus the file system recovery time is much shorter than the UFS (Unix
File System). HP OnLineJFS provides the online management of the Journaled
File System (JFS). With the addition of HP OnLineJFS, reliable file system
administration can take place dynamically without interrupting user access to the
data resources.
This translates to superior application performance as evidenced by:
Superdome leads the pack with excellent performance across a broad range of
benchmarks.
3
2.5
2
1.5
superdome
#1
superdome
71%
higher than
sun
superdome
#1
1
hp
superdome
ibm e-server p680/ s80
compaq
gs320
sun e10000
0.5
0
tpc-h/ 1 tb
tpc-c/ oracle
sap ato
**sun withdrew tpc-h on february 13, 2001
specsfs
97
SAP ATO benchmark measures real world application and the best performance was
achieved by superior performance of hp-ux11i and Oracle 8i. Combination of HP-UX’s
low overhead and Oracle database optimization enabled these remarkable results.
1184
30
1094
16
1600
00
1400
00
1200
00
1000
SPECJBB 2000 HP’s 16 way
Keystone is faster
than Sun’s 24 way
SunFire!
00
800
00
600
00
400
00
200
00 0
SUN SunFire
HP Keystone
6800
rp8400
(24 way)
(16 way)
SPECJBB 2000 evaluates the performance of server-side Java and assesses its scalability.
The Spec emulates a 3-tier system, the most common type of server-side Java application
today. The spec predominantly measures the work of the middle tier including business
logic and object manipulation. Clients are replaced using driver threads and database
storage with binary trees of objects. Increasing amounts of workload are applied,
providing a graphical view of scalability.
HP-UX is faster than Sun’s without applying the hotspot technology that Sun had utilized
for its benchmark.
Linear Scalability:
Hp-ux is the only operating systems that delivers linear scalability and makes it very
simple for IT managers to augment performance and predict TCO. When the Spec JBB
2000 benchmark was run across Keystone servers with CPUs of 4, 8, 12 and 16, a clear
linear scalability emerges. Thus IT managers can be assured and can predict performance
scalability with additional cpus that can be added on the fly with hp-ux.
(16 way)
120000
(12 way)
SPECJBB 2000
20002000
100000
(8 way)
80000
60000
118430
(4 way)
40000
68046
20000
95323
95323
37620
0
HP rp8400
HP rp8400
HP rp8400
HP rp8400
The Broadvision benchmark further validates this point with Superdome scalability.
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